provided funding for social welfare workers and internships, psychiatric staff, and individual financial emergencies not covered by government funds. For eight hours a day, the inmates made clothing and flags at the reformatory for the state or worked in the prison kitchens and its farm unit, and Van Waters supplemented the required work with voluntary educational courses in arts and crafts, literature, theater, singing, journalism, hiking, and how to live after parole. A typical number of course offerings during Van Waters' tenure was 26 or more, according to Dominique T. Chlup, a professor of adult education at Texas A&M University. Van Waters expanded an indenture program that under Hodder had allowed trusted inmates to work outside the prison as household domestics, kitchen helpers, hospital maids, and laundresses before returning to prison at night. To these, Van Waters added positions in local business and industry that needed workers, such as shoemakers, with a variety of skills. These changes displeased members of the state parole board, who viewed indenture as a way to circumvent their authority. Since the parole board members as well as Van Waters' immediate supervisor, the commissioner of corrections, were appointed by the governor, Van Waters' ability to run the reformatory as she wanted depended, as it had at El Retiro, on politics. From 1932 through 1945, Van Waters' had sufficient political support for her methods, but that support waned after World War II. After the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, a conservative backlash against New Deal policies was accompanied by campaigns to portray liberals such as Van Waters as subversives who undermined the traditional social order. Van Water's resistance to authority, her use of indenture to place female prisoners in jobs that others might want, and her woman-centered personal life made her vulnerable to such reproach. In 1948, Elliot McDowell, the newly appointed commissioner of corrections, and his deputy, Frank Dwyer, began an investigation that focused on alleged homosexuality at the reformatory. Dwyer, a former state policeman, sought evidence to confirm rumors that a Framingham inmate whose death had been reported as a suicide, had been murdered by a jealous lesbian. Dwyer concluded that the rumors were false, but his interrogations of staff and inmates led to broader charges of lesbian activity at Framingham, and he leaked details about his probe to the tabloid press in Boston. Van Waters, who distinguished between supportive romantic relationships